The Golden Hour Read online

  “It’s probably the pilot,” she said. “Do you know how to light a pilot?”

  “I can figure it out,” I said.

  “Usually there are instructions somewhere on the furnace itself. There should be matches in the cupboard. Are you freezing?” she asked.

  “It’s a little nippy,” I said, smiling.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. I signed up for this, remember?”

  On her end of the line, I could hear the familiar sounds of the subway, the rattle of the tracks, the voice announcing a train’s arrival. I felt a pang of homesickness.

  “Hey, who owned the house before you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It was in probate. Why?”

  “When I was in the basement I found a box . . .”

  “What?” The train had arrived, the dinging and shuffle and hustle too loud to hear over.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “I’m losing you. Call me if you can’t get the pilot lit.”

  “Okay,” I said, but her phone had already cut out.

  * * *

  I searched the drawers for the matches.

  “Oh my God!” I screamed. A dead mouse was curled up inside the one where our silverware would go.

  “What’s the matter, Mama?” Avery stood up, and I slammed the drawer shut.

  “Nothing. It’s just really dirty in here. Do not open any of the drawers.”

  One catastrophe at a time.

  “You stay right here,” I said. To make sure she wouldn’t go wandering, I found the coloring book and box of stubby crayons I kept in my purse.

  I located the instructions on the side of the furnace, just as Pilar had promised, and felt like an idiot for not noticing them before. I read through them twice before starting with step one. I turned the pilot valve to OFF. Counted five minutes in my head, waiting for any residual gas to clear, turned it to PILOT, located the pilot, and lit my match. I said a prayer, closed my eyes, and reached the flame in. The whoosh startled me, and my eyes sprang open, my heart whooshing along with the flame. I did it! I then turned the knob to ON and the furnace shuddered and rumbled to life. I felt ridiculously proud of myself, but mostly relieved to have not blown myself, or the house, up.

  Upstairs, air blasted hot through the vents, and wonder of all wonders, began to fill the rooms with the smell of burning dust, but also with heat. I could do this. We would be okay.

  I spent the morning cleaning the kitchen and the bedroom Avery had chosen for herself. By lunchtime, I’d managed to unpack our meager kitchen supplies and had made a list of everything we’d need to pick up the next time we went into Portland. I figured we’d only need to go onto the mainland once to refill our cupboards before Pilar arrived at Thanksgiving. I really hoped we could find what we needed until then on the island.

  Avery had grown tired with coloring, and so I waited until she was occupied with her toy ponies in her room (a prenap ritual) before extricating the dead mouse from the drawer. I used a pair of salad tongs I’d found in a cupboard and dropped it into a plastic bag. “Sorry, little guy,” I offered and carried it outside to look for a place to throw it away.

  I circled the perimeter of the house, studying my surroundings for the first time. The back and sides of the house faced a thick patch of woods. The front of the house sat perched at the top of a cliff (one of the island’s namesake bluffs, I supposed) that led down to a rocky cove. There wasn’t another house in sight, though Pilar had said there were neighbors. I figured they must be down the road a ways, or on the other side of those woods.

  I thought about tossing the mouse down the cliffs; I’d aim for the sea. But the tide was low, and it would likely just land on the sand. Some unsuspecting sap might go out for a walk and step on it. And so I went around the back of the house and walked to the edge of the woods. There seemed to be a path, or at least a clearing there, and I smelled the faint but distinct scent of wood smoke. I looked up, and sure enough, in the distance I could see smoke billowing out from an invisible chimney. I hurled the mouse as hard as I could into the dark thickness of trees and backed away from the woods, feeling my heart clattering around in my chest like those used-up rolls of film inside that box.

  The Birches

  When Avery went down for her nap, I unloaded a large canvas from the trunk and brought it into the bright, empty dining room, which was now flooded with light. I had already committed to this commission, but I figured as soon as it was done, I could start to work on my own projects. My goal was to finish before Pilar arrived.

  My client had seen one of my paintings, “fallen in looove” with my “work,” and asked me to paint one of my signature tree paintings, making sure to incorporate plenty of rust and gray to pick up on the colors in her throw pillows. She had actually sent me, express mail, paint chips of her wall color and fabric swatches from said pillows. This painting was to be situated, ultimately, above a slate fireplace in her ski lodge in Aspen.

  I’d started painting birches years ago. I was pregnant with Avery, Gus and I were renting a shitty basement apartment that had rats ten times the size of the mouse I had just chucked into the woods, and neither one of us had a regular paycheck. There was a coffee shop around the corner that periodically offered wall space to local artists, and I had brought in a painting I’d made as soon as I found out I was pregnant. It was of trees, of course, because I had not yet wearied of their bark and branches. I had meticulously crafted each trunk, the bark nearly photo-realistic, but the spaces between the trees were where the energy was, where the danger was. I had been sweating, my heart racing as I painted those shadows. The painting, in many ways, terrified me.

  And I remember thinking even then how strange it felt to hang it up on those exposed brick walls, to slap a truly arbitrary price on it ($500, I recall, which seemed a ridiculous figure, foolishly optimistic), to have it hanging above a battered wooden table where people slurped overpriced coffee and choked down dry scones.

  I’d done shows in art school, of course, but the only people who came to those exhibits were other students and teachers. Sometimes family, friends. If there was buzz around a particular student, then there was an occasional critic. But the pristine white walls, the nodding heads—they were all of the same world.

  We were all exposing ourselves. Exhibitionists. Putting those dangerous trees in my local coffee shop, where a homeless man once sat in the corner picking the dead skin off his feet, where babies wailed and tired mothers commiserated, where couples courted and split up, where exasperated waitresses cleaned up spilled milk, spilled coffee, and so many crumbs, felt like I’d torn my heart from my chest and hung it there with a price tag affixed to it.

  But we were living hand to mouth, and that hand was sometimes empty. I figured if I could sell just one painting then I could cut back on my shifts at the bar. Staying awake until 3 A.M. had been hard enough when I wasn’t pregnant, but nearly impossible now that I was. Gus had just started working at the sign shop. He was making barely above minimum wage, but they let him use the space after hours for his own work. We did what we needed to do. And I knew I needed to do this.

  And so when the call came from the coffee shop manager that someone wanted the painting, it wasn’t uncertainty I felt at all, but relief. Our cupboards were empty. I couldn’t even afford the prenatal vitamins I knew I needed, never mind vegetables. Thank God, my parents still paid my health insurance, which, while considered catastrophic, thankfully included maternity care—though I suppose other people like us might classify that as a catastrophe. Five hundred dollars would pay the rent on that crappy apartment for a whole month. We might even be able to get ahead.

  But when the same man who bought the painting asked me to do another, but this time, maybe “just the trees,” I felt that awful unease setting in. “I love the birches, my wife loves the birches, but there’s something a bit dark about the background. If you could just make it a bit, I d
on’t know, cheerier?” He’d had a mustache, with crumbs of a blueberry scone clinging for dear life as he talked to me at one of those rickety tables.

  I’d nodded my head even as my heart resisted. He said he’d pay me a thousand dollars if I could make this one bigger. “Twenty-four by thirty-six,” he’d said. “I’m looking to fill a space in the waiting room at my office.” He was a psychiatrist with a practice on the Upper East Side. (I still have no idea what he’d been doing in Queens that day.) Countless wealthy patients would walk by my trees every day. He promised I could put out business cards, postcards. That dozens of wealthy housewives who came in to get their heads shrunk (my words, not his) would pass by my trees every day. That legions of anxious, anorexic, depressed, disgruntled, or simply lonely women would be exposed to my art. And so, I said yes.

  By the time Avery was born, I had opened my Etsy shop with greeting cards, giclée prints, and original commissions made to the customer’s color and size specifications, which was my real bread and butter. And those shadows? They disappeared. I pushed them out of the margins of the paintings; they resided off the canvas, lingered at the tips of my fingers, and finally receded into my imagination.

  This latest commission, this one I’d dragged my feet on and then dragged with me all the way to Maine, was for Ginger Hardy, one of Dr. Holder’s patients. (My guess was narcissism with a touch of anxiety.) Her husband knew some bigwig art publisher. She’d alluded several times that she could imagine my work being licensed and mass-produced. Sold at Crate and Barrel or Pier 1. Bed Bath & Beyond. She’d winked and said, “Make this one a good one and you never know . . .”

  I laid the canvas out on the floor in a pool of sunlight. I spread the swatches of fabric, the paint chips, next to it and stood over it, staring at my sketches. I’m not sure what people liked so much about the birches. I suspect it’s that they are such innocuous trees. Pale, thin, almost fragile-looking. Nonthreatening. I’d thought so once too, of course. I’d also been fooled to believe those shadows didn’t exist.

  Night Pictures

  I was taught in art school that an artist must pay attention not only to the light, but also to the shadows; it is in the contrast between light and dark where the beauty lies. Da Vinci used a technique called sfumato (after the Italian sfumare, “to evaporate like smoke”). In this technique, colors are blended together softly, the contrast between light and shadow a gentle thing. A nebulous one. Think of the Mona Lisa. That ethereal flesh, that ambiguous smile.

  However, to achieve a more dramatic effect, the other Old Masters used chiaroscuro, which in Italian literally means “light dark.” It is a technique that relies on the contrast between darkness and light to create a dramatic effect. Rembrandt used it. Caravaggio. De La Tour.

  Tenebroso is an extreme style of chiaroscuro, with dramatic, even violent, illumination. In these seventeenth century paintings, figures are often illumed by a single light source, with all else left in darkness. Painting this way was referred to as the “dark manner,” these portraits, “night pictures.”

  If this day were a painting, it would be like this. The focus drawn to the violence by a solitary spot of light (sun piercing through the trees, illuminating that spot inside the dark woods). A “night picture” so shocking and startling, you need to look away.

  Da Vinci said, “A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”

  And so, perhaps, if this day were a painting, I would begin with black.

  Mermaid Tears

  By the time Avery woke up, I was sick of painting. I’d made progress on only a single trunk. Each one required a sort of manic attention to detail; my hand cramped up after only a couple hours of work. I never thought of painting as manual labor until I started working on commissions.

  “How about after you have some lunch we go exploring?” I said as she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and nestled into the crook of my arm.

  The climb down the cliff was a bit more precarious than it looked. I held her hand as we walked from one craggy rock ledge to the next. It was really, really windy. My hair whipped around my face violently. I wished I’d worn a hat to keep my ears warm; they ached and itched from the cold. Avery’s cheeks looked like they’d been slapped.

  By the time we reached the sand, I was already thinking about what a nightmare it was going to be to get back up again. There had to be a way up that didn’t require mountain climbing equipment.

  The stretch of beach was small, but beautiful. As soon as we reached the sand and Avery was sure-footed again, she began to run, gleefully squealing into the wind. She chased the waves and then backed up, her little feet bicycling so she wouldn’t get wet.

  “The water is cold, Mama!” she said, but her face was joyful.

  As she played, I walked slowly along the sand, when I suddenly spotted a sliver of something blue and picked it up. Sea glass. There had been tons of sea glass in Providence. Sally, one of my friends from school, wound up opening a shop that sold jewelry made from the treasures she found along the shore. She’d made me a bracelet once; I still had it somewhere. I’d have to find it, maybe give it to Avery when she was older.

  I kept scouring the sand, sure this was just a fluke, but soon I saw another cobalt piece, an emerald shard, a fleshy pink marble.

  Avery was about a hundred feet ahead of me. “Av,” I hollered, “look!”

  She came running back to me, and I held out my open palm. She peered down at the smooth, colored glass with wide eyes.

  “What are they, Mama?”

  I remembered Sally telling me a story once. A myth. “I think,” I said, quietly, conspiratorially, “they’re mermaid tears.”

  “Mermaid tears?” she repeated, cocking her head and considering the possibility.

  “Yes,” I said. “This means there’s a mermaid living somewhere near here who has been banished to the sea. When she cries, her tears wash ashore and turn into colored glass.”

  “What’s bamished?”

  “Banished. It means she’s not allowed to leave the sea, ever again.”

  “That’s sad. Who bamished her?”

  “Neptune,” I said. “The god of the sea.”

  “Sage doesn’t believe in God.” Sage was a preschool classmate with a terminally runny nose.

  I had no answer for this, and it wasn’t really a question anyway, so I just kept walking, picking up the sea glass, which I gave to her piece by piece.

  “She must be really sad,” she said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  We collected the pieces and made a pile of gems on a flat rock a safe distance from the waves crashing angrily against the jetty that divided us from our neighbors’ beach.

  “Let’s go see what’s over there,” I said, motioning to a patch of sea grass that further divided Pilar’s property from whoever owned the house with the smoking chimney next door.

  She shoved all of the glass treasures into the pockets of her sandy jeans and took my hand as we made our way to the jetty, where I helped her climb up the rocks. We peered at the beach beyond.

  “Can we go over there?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “It’s a free country,” she said, nodding knowingly. This was something else she’d picked up at preschool. She used it pretty much any time she wanted to do something we didn’t want her to do. And then some.

  We climbed to the opposite side of the jetty. On this side was a pristine beach as well as a boathouse and, sure enough, a set of stone steps leading up the rocky face of the cliff. We climbed up to the top, where there was a giant, grassy clearing, and in the distance I could see the source of the smoke.

  There was the real Grey Gardens, a massive, colossal really, house: a Tudor mansion, very Kennedian.

  “Wow!” Avery said. “That’s a big house.”

  “That is a very big house.”

  “Who lives there?” she asked.

  “
I have no idea.”

  “Probably a movie star. Maybe Taylor Swift.”

  “I don’t think so. But you never know,” I said. I wasn’t sure how she even knew who Taylor Swift was. I blamed the preschool.

  “Can we go see if they have kids?” she asked.

  I doubted there were any children living beyond those manicured hedges. But I didn’t have the heart to crush her dreams of a playmate.

  I shook my head. “Not today.”

  “But maybe they have a little girl.”

  “I need you to help me paint this afternoon,” I said.

  “Trees?” She scowled.

  “No, silly, your room.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if I’d offered her a bran muffin in place of a piece of chocolate cake.

  “There’s a shortcut to our house,” she said. “Look.”

  And she was right, there was a pathway that led away from this sprawling lawn to the small forest dividing our properties.

  “Can we go that way?”

  I felt my chest constrict. I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “We should go back the way we came.”

  “Why?”

  But how do you explain? How do you ever explain that to a child? That the world is a dangerous place, that there are monsters that live under your bed. That the bogeyman is real. I figured it was my job as a mom to keep my daughter somehow both happily oblivious and safe. So I said, “It’s trespassing. That means we have to stay on our side until we’ve been invited.”

  “Oh,” she said. At least I could also thank preschool for teaching a bunch of arbitrary rules regarding possession and sharing.

  “Here, can you carry the sea glass?” I asked.

  “What’s sea glass?”

  “I mean the mermaid’s tears,” I corrected myself. “Put them in your pocket so we can climb back up.”

  Halfway up the rocky cliff, I was thinking I should have just sucked it up and taken the path through the woods. These bluffs were more dangerous.